"While recognizing the many awesome aspects of introversion is indeed awesome, making 'I’m an introvert!' the mantra by which you live your life can narrow the way you see and understand yourself,"writes Baer. He then went on to quote Cambridge University personality psychologist Brian Little, who believes that "some introverts are seeing themselves as nothing but introverts. And doing so is to ignore the other four dimensions of the Big Five personality schema."

Reminder: The Big Five includes agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience in addition to extraversion/introversion. Psychologists contend that people are made up of bits and pieces of each. Latching on to just one of the five tentpoles can be a deterrent, as doing so "decreases our degrees of freedom to enact our lives… in a way that will go down to our values, to the thing that really matter to us," says Little.